Might be a little slow on the draw with this one… but not too long ago (when I wrote down the idea), the Canadian Dollar had actually surpassed the US Dollar in value!  Sure, it might only be just a few cents, but historically we US folks generally considered getting Canadian currency from vending machines to be something of a misfortune.  Mainly because, in our eyes, it was mostly worthless.  I guess you could slip one by if nobody was looking and sometimes the soda machines will take them, if they were an older model.  But for the most part, you can’t use them for much of anything.  I suppose you can say that about most foreign currencies, but Canada is like right there and our coins are pretty similar in shape, size, and color.  Thus, we get a lot of them from time to time as well as bouts of rage from virtually losing a coin.

But now the glove’s on the other foot, eh!  That Canadian Quarter you got from the vendomatic is (err… sporadically and temporarily) worth more than your stinky old US Quarter!  Kind of a bad measure of economics I suppose, but at face value it doesn’t look very good for us.  Ya know, since both currencies are soooo close in value, why don’t we just do the Euro thing and merge them?  Our countries are kinda glued together so it makes sense… well… for simplicity anyways.  Makes you wonder if we should just do a single global economy since it seems to be all tied together already.

Oh, fun little fact about currencies!  A few years back they tried pushing the “Sacagawea Dollars” and I guess their idea of integrating them into the system was to stock vending machines with them… and only them.  Kind of backfired because I remember getting a ton of them from soda/food machines and every place I went refused to take them.  Guess it was because they looked like foreign coins.  I think I ended up turning them in at the bank for real money.  heh!  >)